OpenLogos Semantico-Syntactic Knowledge-Rich Bilingual Dictionaries

This paper presents 3 sets of OpenLogos resources, namely the English-German, the English-French, and the English-Italian bilingual dictionaries. In addition to the usual information on part-of-speech, gender, and number for nouns, offered by most dictionaries currently available, OpenLogos bilingual dictionaries have some distinctive features that make them unique: they contain cross-language morphological information (inflectional and derivational), semantico-syntactic knowledge, indication of the head word in multiword units, information about whether a source word corresponds to an homograph, information about verb auxiliaries, alternate words (i.e., predicate or process nouns), causatives, reflexivity, verb aspect, among others. The focal point of the paper will be the semantico-syntactic knowledge that is important for disambiguation and translation precision. The resources are publicly available at the METANET platform for free use by the research community.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Mixed up with machine Translation: Multi-word Units Disambiguation Challenge.

With the rapid evolution of the Internet, translation has become part of the daily life of ordinary users, not only of professional translators. Machine translation has evolved along with different types of computer-assisted translation tools. Qualitative progress has been made in the field of machine translation, but not all problems have been solved. The current times are auspicious for the development of more sophisticated evaluation tools that measure the performance of specific linguistic phenomena. One problem in particular, namely the poor analysis and translation of multi-word units, is an arena where investment in linguistic knowledge systems with the goal of improving machine translation would be beneficial. This paper addresses the difficulties multi-word units present to machine translation, by comparing translations performed by systems adopting different approaches to machine translation. It proposes a solution for improving the quality of the translation of multi-word units by adopting a methodology that combines Lexicon Grammar resources with OpenLogos lexical resources and semantico-syntactic rules. Finally, it discusses how an ideal machine translation evaluation tool might look to correctly evaluate the performance of machine translation engines with regards to multi-word units and thus to contribute to the improvement of translation quality

Multi-word unit processing in machine translation. Developing and using language resources for multi-word unit processing in machine translation

2011 - 2012XI n.s

Contractions: to align or not to align, that is the question

This paper performs a detailed analysis on the alignment of Portuguese contractions, based on a previously aligned bilingual corpus. The alignment task was performed manually in a subset of the English-Portuguese CLUE4Translation Alignment Collection. The initial parallel corpus was pre-processed and a decision was made as to whether the contraction should be maintained or decomposed in the alignment. Decomposition was required in the cases in which the two words that have been concatenated, i.e., the preposition and the determiner or pronoun, go in two separate translation alignment pairs (PT - [no seio de] [a União Europeia] EN - [within] [the European Union]). Most contractions required decomposition in contexts where they are positioned at the end of a multiword unit. On the other hand, contractions tend to be maintained when they occur at the beginning or in the middle of the multiword unit, i.e., in the frozen part of the multiword (PT - [no que diz respeito a] EN - [with regard to] or PT - [além disso] EN - [in addition]. A correct alignment of multiwords and phrasal units containing contractions is instrumental for machine translation, paraphrasing, and variety adaptationinfo:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Multiword expression processing: A survey

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are a class of linguistic forms spanning conventional word boundaries that are both idiosyncratic and pervasive across different languages. The structure of linguistic processing that depends on the clear distinction between words and phrases has to be re-thought to accommodate MWEs. The issue of MWE handling is crucial for NLP applications, where it raises a number of challenges. The emergence of solutions in the absence of guiding principles motivates this survey, whose aim is not only to provide a focused review of MWE processing, but also to clarify the nature of interactions between MWE processing and downstream applications. We propose a conceptual framework within which challenges and research contributions can be positioned. It offers a shared understanding of what is meant by "MWE processing," distinguishing the subtasks of MWE discovery and identification. It also elucidates the interactions between MWE processing and two use cases: Parsing and machine translation. Many of the approaches in the literature can be differentiated according to how MWE processing is timed with respect to underlying use cases. We discuss how such orchestration choices affect the scope of MWE-aware systems. For each of the two MWE processing subtasks and for each of the two use cases, we conclude on open issues and research perspectives

As Wordnets do Português

Series: "Oslo Studies in Language". ISSN 1890-9639. 7(1), 2015.Not many years ago it was usual to comment on the lack of an open lexical- semantic knowledge base, following the lines of Princeton WordNet, but for Portuguese. Today, the landscape has changed significantly, and re- searchers that need access to this specific kind of resource have not one, but several alternatives to choose from. The present article describes the wordnet-like resources currently available for Portuguese. It provides some context on their origin, creation approach, size and license for utilization. Apart from being an obvious starting point for those looking for a computational resource with information on the meaning of Portuguese words, this article describes the resources available, compares them and lists some plans for future work, sketching ideas for potential collaboration between the projects described.CLUPFundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

On the integration of linguistic features into statistical and neural machine translation

Recent years have seen an increased interest in machine translation technologies and applications due to an increasing need to overcome language barriers in many sectors. New machine translations technologies are emerging rapidly and with them, bold claims of achieving human parity such as: (i) the results produced approach "accuracy achieved by average bilingual human translators [on some test sets]" (Wu et al., 2017b) or (ii) the "translation quality is at human parity when compared to professional human translators" (Hassan et al., 2018) have seen the light of day (Läubli et al., 2018). Aside from the fact that many of these papers craft their own definition of human parity, these sensational claims are often not supported by a complete analysis of all aspects involved in translation. Establishing the discrepancies between the strengths of statistical approaches to machine translation and the way humans translate has been the starting point of our research. By looking at machine translation output and linguistic theory, we were able to identify some remaining issues. The problems range from simple number and gender agreement errors to more complex phenomena such as the correct translation of aspectual values and tenses. Our experiments confirm, along with other studies (Bentivogli et al., 2016), that neural machine translation has surpassed statistical machine translation in many aspects. However, some problems remain and others have emerged. We cover a series of problems related to the integration of specific linguistic features into statistical and neural machine translation, aiming to analyse and provide a solution to some of them. Our work focuses on addressing three main research questions that revolve around the complex relationship between linguistics and machine translation in general. By taking linguistic theory as a starting point we examine to what extent theory is reflected in the current systems. We identify linguistic information that is lacking in order for automatic translation systems to produce more accurate translations and integrate additional features into the existing pipelines. We identify overgeneralization or 'algorithmic bias' as a potential drawback of neural machine translation and link it to many of the remaining linguistic issues